Creative Confidence: Unleashing The Creative Potential Within Us All

Updated: Saturday December 7, 2013 MYT 11:01:48 AM

Age-old question answered

BY NICK WALKER

The Kelley brothers, David (right) founder of IDEO and Tom

Creative Confidence: Unleashing The Creative Potential Within Us All

Authors: Tom Kelley and David Kelley

Publisher: Crown

TODAY, the demand for reviews of business-related non-fiction remains robust. And the market gets what the market wants from middle-aged me. At least, until I can commoditise my daydreams. But the younger me naturally sought out genres more appealing to the juvenile mind. And for a while – while I was a “tweenie” – my passion was for those wonderful illustrated Tin Tin books (which have stood the test of time; they still sell well today).So when I noticed that the authors of CreativeConfidence looked uncannily like Thomson and Thompson, two bungling detectives who cropped up in just about every far-flung Tin Tin adventure, I was intrigued more by their faces than by the uninspired title of this work. After all, it’s an overworked theme: is creativity inherent or can it be learned? Most titles that address this question flounder in a morass of inconclusive personal observations and trite truisms.

Can the Kelleys succeed where so many others have fallen short of expectations? I say yes, with some qualifications.

But first, who are these Thomson and Thompson doppelgängers? The older Kelley, David, is a businessman, entrepreneur, designer, and a professor at California’s Stanford University. Tom is another high-flier – a business consultant, acclaimed author and public speaker of global renown.

Together the siblings, who hail from Ohio state in the United States, have generated a great deal of synergy in this useful book.

Their over-arching message is that the long-standing assumption is wrong. Are creativity and innovation strictly the domain of the “creative types”? Definitely not, say the Kelleys.

But this challenge has been made already. Educators, behaviologists and other researchers have been countering this misconception for decades. But this point of (non-)contention does provide the Kelleys with a springboard from which to make some important points about creativity and innovation, and how it can be enhanced and harnessed to improve any business and its profitability. And also, how certain behaviours can be applied to personal development, to fulfill goals and attain greater confidence.

Furthermore, they identify the principles and strategies that they believe will allow readers to tap more easily into our creative potential, both at work and in our personal lives.

The Kelley’s also hit on something that many other authors addressing the creativity issue miss. And it arrives in this line: “creative confidence is a way of seeing that potential and your place in the world more clearly, unclouded by anxiety and doubt. We hope you’ll join us on our quest to embrace creative confidence in our lives. Together, we can all make the world a better place.” There it is. Fear. That’s the enemy of creativity and innovation. For the fearful – of what others may think of your boat-rocking (which is how creativity is often viewed in the office) – this book is a godsend.

There are many messages contained in these pages, delivered through narratives and case studies that are breezily engaging. Quite a few of them are self-evident, but still worth reiterating in the 21st century workplace.

For example, the Kellys posit that the mathematics of innovation dictate that if you desire more success, you have to be prepared to shrug off more failure. Success and failure are flip-sides of the same spinning coin.

The father of electricity Thomas Edison and his approach to his epoch-changing innovations and discoveries are cited here, along with two other famous Ohio native-son siblings, the Wright Brothers who piloted the first powered flight almost exactly a century ago.

They also encourage the reader to be to the lookout for the sometimes almost-imperceptible sparks that can trigger remarkable innovation.

This they illustrate through the story of the “embrace infant warmer”, an elegantly simple medical device that costs over 90% less than a conventional baby incubator, and has now saved the lives of countless newborns in developing countries.

This innovation began as a humble routine class assignment at Stanford University. A few sparks from the restless brains of a group of students generated an extraordinary product.

Ample space is also given to the “sweet spot between passion and possibility”, and the Kelleys argue that arriving at this wonderful destination requires getting in a mindset that Hungarian-American Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (another expert in the field of positive psychology), calls “flow”. This is the creative state in which time seems to dissolve and you are completely immersed in an activity for its own sake. When you are in a state, the temporal world around you falls away, you’re fully engaged – and your endeavours get a chance to nurture extraordinary results.

The authors concede that societal pressures and corporate rules and expectations force us toward behaviors that are blandly “appropriate”, thereby stifling creativity. But they contend that the rewards for creativity and individuality are still worth relentlessly striving for.

Here, my brow furrowed. The corporate world that I’ve worked in on-and-off for some two decades is so unforgivingly configured against individual creativity that the authors’ battle-cry to “think different” are hard to take seriously. Office dissidents are often placed in exile until they learn to conform again.

So I have messaged the Kelleys. Can you get to work on a sequel to this rather impressive and uplifting work? What the market needs now is a book on how workplaces and office mindsets can be liberalised, in the interests of promoting creativity. This is a bigger challenge than explaining how we can tap inner creativepotential, as important as that message is.

In the view diametrically opposite to the Kelleys’, the world is strictly divided intocreative types and functionaries, and both are equally vital for the harmonious working of businesses. A few straddle both camps uncomfortably, and a lucky few – the late Steve Jobs for example – straddle them with ease.

I used to hold to this view, but after reading Creative Confidence my thinking is a little less rigid. Whatever your take on the topic, this is a good life-affirming read, containing a slew of inspirational success stories.

Maybe you’ll set the world on fire after reading this. Maybe you won’t. In any event, it’s a few ringgit well-spent for some well-expressed wisdom. And a better tome on the topic won’t come around for a while.